Guilty Confessions

Hannah Tierney (University of Sydney)

Guilty Confessions

In discussions of the relationship between the reactive attitudes and blameworthiness, resentment has historically taken centre stage. Recently, however, these discussions have prominently featured another reactive attitude: guilt. Guilt-based views of blameworthiness are promising, in part, because they are able to capture a particular function of blame better than any of the traditional views. If the point of blame is to allocate suffering to wrongdoers, then guilt-based accounts have a clear advantage over their competitors. This is due to the nature of guilt, and the philosophers who develop guilt-based views do an excellent job of attending to the cognitive and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s distinctive action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. In this talk, I will reflect on the nature of guilty confessions and argue that they illuminate an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect.